Our Political Parties Have A Climate Policy Credibility Gap

Renew Economy - John Connor*

While the Coalition, Labor, Greens and Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) now support emissions trading and renewable energy, albeit to varying degrees, a gap is opening between their policies and the views held by the Australian community and business.
Both major parties have committed to significant post-election policy reviews. Such a review will be crucial, both to avoid the social and economic instability of this gap, and if our country is to begin to take credible climate action.
The reality is that all the policies of each of the federal parties need work to become credible, scalable and durable. Policies are “Credible” if they explicitly link to shared, meaningful, climate outcomes with transparent review processes. “Scalable” means they address large parts of the economy and can be ramped up, or down, as needed. “Durable” means they are informed by principles that maintain Australia’s economic competitiveness and enhance equity – that is, they are capable of maintaining political support and investor confidence over coming decades.
Both major parties have supported the Paris climate agreement’s goals of keeping global warming “well below” 2°C and to “pursue efforts” to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. With massive reef bleaching, severe storms and unprecedented bushfire weather, it is abundantly clear that Australia is already experiencing significant human, economic and environmental costs …and we only have approximately 1°C of warming already recorded.
It is sobering to realise that if other nations were to have similar emission reduction targets to those that the Coalition currently has, the result would be 3-4°C of global warming, with devastating impacts for Australia. If countries had similar targets to those currently supported by Labor, the world would warm by 2-3°C, also with huge threats for Australians, our economy and environment. Only the Greens and the Glenn Lazarus Team (GLT) have targets aligned to the 1.5-2°C goal, which itself still carries predictable and dangerous impacts. Initial commitments made by countries before Paris would lead to around 3°C of warming. It is clear that Australia and other countries need to do more.
The Paris agreement also includes the goal of attaining net zero emissions. Both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader have acknowledged this goal. They join investors, central bankers, and global and Australian businesses in doing so. Even multinational oil company, Shell, acknowledges that the 1.5°C goal requires the achievement of net zero emissions by 2050. We are now seeing more and more companies, states and nations setting similar or stronger goals. The carbon emissions intensity of an economy has become a key competitiveness test in the 21st century.
Yet the Coalition’s current 2030 emission reduction targets would put Australia’s per person pollution at 18th among G20 nations, ahead only of Russia and Saudi Arabia. Labor’s current targets would place Australia 15th, and NXT 10th. The Greens and GLT targets would place us 8th.
In addition to these indicators, The Climate Institute tested current policies against three key policy tests: Can they help limit dangerous global warming? Can they help build a modern and net zero emissions economy? Do they integrate assessment of climate risks and opportunities into decision-making?
The Climate Institute engaged with the parties about its policy priorities. In doing so, we found the largest climate policy credibility gaps are with the Jacqui Lambie Network and the Coalition. The Greens, the GLT and Labor respectively have stronger policies. The Nick Xenophon Team has strengths, but requires more detail.
Despite the growing human, economic and environmental costs of climate change to Australia, no party has sufficient policy detail about building greater resilience. Labor and the Greens have agreed to integrate climate risk assessments into core decision-making, and the Greens have led resilience policy development, but all need to improve or follow through with urgency.
Today, we released our Climate Policy Credibility Assessment which recommends three critical steps that all parties should pursue in order for Australia to achieve credible climate policies that are also durable and scalable:

1. Set pre-2050 net zero emission objectives, credible emission reduction pathways and regular independent processes of review 
2. Implement economic and community strategies to manage the transition to decarbonisation, and 
3. Integrate assessments of climate risks and opportunities into core decision making.

As part of this research, we also conducted national polling which has shown that the concern Australians have about climate change has surged since the lows of 2012 and the last election. Support for Australian climate leadership is returning to 2008 levels and an overwhelming majority see the economic opportunities in taking action. Mainstream business and investor groups are also increasingly frustrated by ongoing policy disputes and are calling for the integration of climate and energy policies.
Australia has some big choices to make, both at this election and in the policy reviews that the Coalition or Labor will run over the next 12 months. We can continue to back inadequate emission reduction targets and policy uncertainty that leave us at the back of the pack of comparable countries. This will simply intensify employment and economic risks alongside an increasingly disruptive catch-up job that becomes more and more unavoidable as time and inaction pass.
Or we can integrate comprehensive climate action into plans to build a modern, innovative, safer and net emissions free economy before 2050. Only this approach will allow us to work with other nations that are leading in providing climate change solutions. Only this approach will also help us prevent current climate risks from becoming significantly more dangerous and costly.

*John Conner is head of The Climate Institute

Links

• The anti-wind and anti-solar garbage fit to print in Murdoch media
• Australia's big energy switch: from coal and gas to wind and solar
• The RET is a high cost way to procure renewable energy
• Barnaby Joyce sitting uncomfortably on renewable energy boom
• The cost issue this election ignored: the doubling of electricity prices

Naomi Klein On The Racism That Underlies Climate Change Inaction

The Saturday Paper - Naomi Klein

Author and social activist Naomi Klein.

In recent months, the world's gaze has landed again and again on a hellish Australian terrain of climate-related disaster. Bushfires ravage some of the planet's oldest trees in Tasmania. Catastrophic coral bleaching leaves much of the Great Barrier Reef a ghostly white. The first known mammal to be wiped out by global warming was recently identified there.
And yet, there is little to no discussion of climate change in your federal election campaign, which is why many Australian groups are forcefully calling for "Pollution Free Politics": as in North America, the fossil fuel industry has managed to capture not only the debate and key levers of policy, but also huge government subsidies that help to lock in their civilisation-threatening business model, even as renewables surge around the world.

The Middle East is now squeezed in the pincer of violence caused by fossil fuels, on the one hand, and the impact of burning those fossil fuels on the other.

But responding to the climate crisis is not just a matter of closing coal plants and building more solar arrays. A rapid transition to green energy is also an opportunity to remake our world for the better – to lower emissions in ways that also address historical injustice and inequality, bolster democracy, and prevent the kind of brutal, inhumane future that we are already catching far too many glimpses of, from the treatment of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru to the devastating tragedy in Orlando.
In March, two major peer-reviewed studies warned that sea-level rise could happen significantly faster than previously believed. One of the authors of the first study was James Hansen, perhaps the most respected climate scientist in the world. He warned that, on our current emissions trajectory, we face the "loss of all coastal cities, most of the world's large cities and all their history" – and not in thousands of years, but as soon as this century.
If we don't demand radical change we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists. In countries such as the Marshall Islands and Fiji and Tuvalu, they know that so much sea-level rise is inevitable that their countries likely have no future. But they refuse just to concern themselves with the logistics of relocation, and wouldn't even if there were safer countries willing to open their borders – a very big if, since climate refugees aren't currently recognised under international law.
Instead they are actively resisting: blockading Australian coal ships with traditional outrigger canoes, disrupting international climate negotiations with their inconvenient presence, demanding far more aggressive climate action. If there is anything worth celebrating in the Paris agreement signed in April – and sadly, there isn't enough – it has come about because of this kind of principled action.
For the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, the refusal of our governments to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without orientalism – what Edward Said described in his landmark book of the same name as "disregarding, essentialising, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region". It would have been impossible without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools – of ranking the relative value of humans – are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.
Why? Because the thing about fossil fuels is that they are so inherently dirty and toxic that they require sacrificial people and places: people whose lungs and bodies can be sacrificed to work in the coalmines, people whose lands and water can be sacrificed to open-pit mining and oil spills. As recently as the 1970s, scientists advising the United States government openly referred to certain parts of the country being designated "national sacrifice areas". Think of the mountains of Appalachia, blasted off for coalmining – because so-called "mountain-top removal" coalmining is cheaper than digging holes underground. There were theories of othering used to justify the sacrificing of an entire geography: after all, if you are a backwards "hillbilly", who cares about your hills?
Turning all that coal into electricity required another layer of othering, too: this time for the urban neighbourhoods next door to the power plants and refineries. In North America, these are overwhelmingly communities of colour, black and Latino, forced to carry the toxic burden of our collective addiction to fossil fuels, with markedly higher rates of respiratory illnesses and cancers. It was in fights against this kind of "environmental racism" that the climate justice movement was born.
Fossil fuel sacrifice zones dot the globe. Take the Niger Delta, poisoned with an Exxon Valdez-worth of spilled oil every year, a process Ken Saro-Wiwa, before he was murdered by his government, called "ecological genocide". The executions of community leaders, he said, were "all for Shell".
Fossil fuels require sacrifice zones: they always have. And you can't have a system built on sacrificial places and sacrificial people unless intellectual theories that justify their sacrifice exist and persist: from manifest destiny to terra nullius to orientalism, from backward hillbillies to backward Indians.
Some people insist that it doesn't have to be this bad. We can clean up resource extraction; we don't need to do it the way it's been done in Appalachia or in the Niger Delta. Except that we are running out of cheap and easy ways to get at fossil fuels. This, in turn, is starting to challenge the original Faustian pact of the industrial age: that the heaviest risks would be outsourced, offloaded, onto the other – the periphery abroad and inside our own nations. From fracking the picturesque countryside to oil trains barrelling through major cities, that outsourcing is becoming less and less possible.
There is also an avalanche of evidence that there is no peaceful way to run an economy powered by coal, oil and gas. The trouble is structural. Fossil fuels, unlike renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar, are not widely distributed but highly concentrated in very specific locations, and those locations have a bad habit of being in other people's countries. Particularly that most potent and precious of fossil fuels: oil. This is why the project of orientalism, of othering Arab and Muslim people, has been the silent partner of our oil dependence from the start – and inextricable, therefore, from the blowback that is climate change. If nations and peoples are regarded as other – exotic, primitive, bloodthirsty, as Said documented in the 1970s – it is far easier to wage wars and stage coups when they get the crazy idea that they should control their own oil in their own interests. The reverberations from such interventions continue to jolt our world, as do the reverberations from the successful burning of all that oil. The Middle East is now squeezed in the pincer of violence caused by fossil fuels, on the one hand, and the impact of burning those fossil fuels on the other.
In his latest book, The Conflict Shoreline, the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has a groundbreaking take on how these forces are intersecting. The main way we've understood the border of the desert in the Middle East and North Africa, he explains, is the so-called "aridity line", areas where there is on average 200 millimetres of rainfall a year, which has been considered the minimum for growing cereal crops on a large scale without irrigation. He documents that all along the aridity line, you see places marked by drought, water scarcity, scorching temperatures and military conflict – from Libya to Palestine to Syria, to some of the bloodiest battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Weizman also discovered what he calls an "astounding coincidence". When you map the targets of Western drone strikes onto the region, you see that "many of these attacks – from South Waziristan through northern Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Iraq, Gaza and Libya – are directly on or close to the 200mm aridity line".
Just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought, so boats follow both: boats filled with refugees fleeing homes on the aridity line ravaged by war and drought. And the same capacity for dehumanising the other that justified the bombs and drones is now being trained on these migrants.
Camps are bulldozed in Calais, thousands of people drown in the Mediterranean, and the Australian government detains survivors of wars and despotic regimes in camps on the remote islands of Nauru and Manus. Conditions are so desperate on Nauru that in April an Iranian migrant died after setting himself on fire to try to draw the world's attention. Another migrant – a 21-year-old woman from Somalia – set herself on fire a few days later. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull warns that Australians "cannot be misty-eyed about this" and "have to be very clear and determined in our national purpose".
I thought about Nauru when I read a columnist in a London-based Murdoch paper declaring that it's time for Britain "to get Australian. Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats." In another bit of symbolism, Nauru is one of the Pacific Islands very vulnerable to sea-level rise. Its residents, after seeing their homes turned into prisons for others, will very possibly have to migrate themselves.
We need to understand that what is happening on Nauru, and what is happening to it, are expressions of the same logic. A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy – that we must take care of our own first – will be marshalled to rationalise these monstrous decisions. We are making this rationalisation already, if only implicitly. Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst.
The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all. The connections and intersections between them are glaring, and yet so often resistance to them is highly compartmentalised. The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change, the climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation.
Overcoming these disconnections – strengthening the threads tying together our various issues and movements – is the most pressing task of anyone concerned with social and economic justice. It is the only way to build a counterpower sufficiently robust to win against the forces protecting the highly profitable but increasingly untenable status quo.

Links

• Naomi Klein's Edward W. Said London Lecture 2016
• The links between big polluters and politicians
• Trans-Pacific Partnership to stall climate change action

Power To The People: How Communities Can Help Meet Our Renewable Energy Goals

The Conversation - Iain MacGill | Franziska Mey

Hepburn Wind is one of Australia's largest community renewable energy schemes. Hepburn Wind/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

The federal election campaign has highlighted the very different visions of Australia's renewable energy future held by the major parties. The Coalition government supports the present Renewable Energy Target (RET) of 33,000 gigawatt-hours from large-scale projects in 2020, which it negotiated with the Labor opposition in 2015.
It's expected to deliver just over a 23% contribution of renewables to the Australian electricity sector in 2020. There is, most likely, only one more federal election before then.
For the longer term, the Coalition proposes no change to this target before 2030 which, given future demand growth, might well see renewables' contribution to Australian electricity supply actually fall.
By comparison, Labor has a target of 50% renewable electricity by 2030 and the Greens a 90% target. Complicating the situation further are the ambitious targets of some state and territory governments.
Targets require means to actually achieve them. The RET is a target, but also a mechanism based around trading in Renewable Energy Certificates. Meeting the agreed 2020 target requires new renewable energy generation to provide these certificates.
The Clean Energy Council estimates that an additional 6,000 megawatts of new renewable generation, requiring around A$10 billion of investment, will be required by 2020.
The new generation and investment required to meet Labor or the Greens' far more ambitious 2030 targets is, of course, far greater.

Energy for the people
Community renewable energy (CRE) may have a key role to play. Community energy can involve supply-side projects such as renewable energy installations and storage, and demand-side projects such as community education, energy efficiency and demand management.
In short, community renewable energy revolves around community ownership, participation, and consequent benefits from community-scale renewable energy projects.
Why would these small-scale projects matter for reaching ambitious renewable energy targets? Surely large industry players are better placed to develop renewables than the community?
Perhaps, but the transition to a renewable energy future will almost certainly require high levels of social consensus and engagement, and community renewable energy can play a key role in building this.
The 2016 edition of the highly authoritative Renewables Global Status Report has just been released, and includes a special chapter on CRE.
If we consider industrialised countries with major progress on renewable energy over the past few decades and ambitious future targets, community energy seems to have played a key role in a number of them.
For example, Denmark has already nearly reached its 50% target for renewable electricity by 2020 and was a pioneer in community energy, beginning in the late 1970s.
Germany reached 32% renewable electricity in 2015 with a target of 40% to 45% by 2025, and has some 850 energy cooperatives. Almost half of its installed capacity is owned by households, communities and farmers.
Community ownership has become a well-established part of the renewable energy sector, and to the energy transition in western countries such as Germany, Denmark, Britain and, increasingly, the United States.
But it is still a fairly new concept to Australia.

Australia's Renewable Energy Target
One reason for this may be the design of our RET itself.
It is actually two schemes: one specifically tailored for households and small business, and the other for far larger-scale projects.
As a result, Australia's renewable landscape is characterised by large utility-sized projects, mostly wind, hydro and bioenergy. Large-scale solar now looks to be taking off too.
At the other end of the spectrum are some 1.5 million household solar photovoltaic (PV) systems; indeed, Australia has the most household PV systems per person in the world.
Community renewable projects, by comparison, are usually mid-sized. They lack the economics of larger renewable projects, and the targeted RET support and simple PV grid connection available to households.
Do we need them given the community's enthusiastic embrace of household PV? Well, not all households have a roof to call their own on which they can install a PV system. For example, 14% of Australians live in apartments. There are also other promising renewable opportunities such as mid-sized wind and biomass projects whose deployment is generally beyond the capabilities of individuals.
Australia's small but growing community movement with over 70 groups and more than 30 operating projects, would certainly seem to highlight the opportunity that now presents itself here – and raises the question of what governments might do to assist them.

Building support
International experience highlights that a range of policy support and other initiatives are a prerequisite for community energy success. Communities often lack the funding, knowledge, capacities or network to organise and construct a project. Specific support for community energy can help reduce risks, build community capability and increase the economic viability of these projects.
Indeed, it is interesting to note that recently announced, more market-focused, changes to the German Renewable Energy Act are being widely criticised because of their likely adverse impacts on community renewable energy.
In Australia, Labor has pledged A$98.7 million and the Greens a total of A$265.2 million to support CRE projects ahead of the election.
Both commitments include support to provide local groups with technical, legal and administrative expertise as seen in so-called "community powerhouses", which are modelled on the Moreland Energy Foundation. Funding for a network of these new support organisations could help to leverage the efforts of community members, local governments and private business towards CRE projects.
The Greens' plan also comprises a range of other initiatives such as tax incentives to support the emerging community renewable energy sector.
The Coalition, by comparison, has pledged A$5 million for grants of up to A$15,000 to community groups to install rooftop PV, solar hot water, other small-scale renewables, and battery energy storage systems, as part of their Solar Communities program.
This might seem strange given the opportunity for CRE to create rural and regional investment and jobs. The Green Tea Party movement in the United States highlights that even the most conservative can get behind community renewables.
Importantly, experience in Australia and elsewhere shows that we need to revisit electricity market arrangements, including regulations governing connection and network tariffs, to facilitate CRE. Our research (just accepted for publication in the Journal of Energy Research & Social Science) has also highlighted that local governments can play a key role in supporting community engagement with renewable energy.
Given the opportunity to spread the benefits of renewables more broadly across the community, we really need all levels of government to get involved.

Links

• Review calls for Renewable Energy Target cuts: what it means
• With big solar Australia could be backing a winner, but it still needs leadership
• Is $15 a year really too much to pay for renewable energy?
• FactCheck Q&A: is Australia the world leader in household solar power?

Without Emissions Cuts, Summer Heat Will Get Even Deadlier

InsideClimate News - Bob Berwyn

New study shows dangerously hot summers will become the norm across much of the globe unless greenhouse gas emissions are significantly reduced.

Heat waves, like the one that baked India this year, will become the new normal without emissions cuts, a new study says. Credit: Reuters

By 2060, large swaths of the planet could be hit by unprecedented heat waves during the summer months that would exceed all historical records, according to a new study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Just as a severe heat wave sizzles the U.S. Southwest, sending temperatures in parts of Arizona to 120 degrees, this new study predicts similarly dangerous heat will become more commonplace. Without major reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, the study said there is a 90 percent chance that every summer will be at least as warm as the hottest to date across large parts of North and South America, Central Europe, Asia and Africa.
That means summers like 2012, when extreme heat was blamed for 32 deaths in a two-week period across the U.S., will become the new normal.
Already, four deaths in Arizona have been attributed to the current heat wave and several large wildfires have begun burning out of control in Arizona as well as in California.
The study said that by 2070, as much as 87 percent of the world's people could face record summer temperatures every second year, unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. More extreme temperatures would lead to more heat-related deaths from direct exposure, as well as contributing to the spread of heat-related disease, like mosquito-borne Zika virus, other research has found. Hotter summers also raise the risk of drought that wipes out crop production causing food price shocks and hunger.
"Recent examples of fatal heat waves and food crises linked to record-breaking summer temperatures can therefore serve as case studies for a potential future norm," the study said.
Many previous studies have confidently singled out climate change as the critical factor in heat waves, which are widely predicted to become more frequent and intense as global warming worsens. But the researchers said because they used an advanced climate model, this is the most accurate assessment yet of the extreme summer heat expected if greenhouse gas emissions continue at or above current rates.
To project the impact of greenhouse gases on future temperatures, they first reproduced past climate using observed global temperature data from 1920 to 2014. The model allowed them to simulate temperatures for 1,425 possible past summers for the same period. That resulted in a much larger range of temperatures to better compare variations caused by natural factors (such as volcanic eruptions) with the effects of increased greenhouse gases.
They then used two simulations to project future summer temperatures through 2100: one assumed greenhouse gas emissions would continue to rise, while the other assumed emissions would fall because of countries meeting their obligations to the Paris climate accord. The next step was to compare those results with the past temperature data to isolate the influence of man-made climate change from natural variability.
From 1980 through the present and into the future, the trend toward more extreme summer heat caused by global warming became clear, the study found.
"By re-running the model multiple times in different conditions we get a broader range of the evolution of climate. That gives us a better sense of what the warming can be attributed to, and  how much of this variability is natural," said lead author Flavio Lehner, a climatologist at NCAR. The results showed that most of the increase in summer heatwaves can be attributed to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.
"People still have a choice. To some extent we can make changes now to mitigate this," Lehner said. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with a 2-degrees Celsius temperature target, the goal of the Paris climate agreement, would lower the chances of extreme summer heatwaves by 41 percent, the study concluded.
The new research reinforces other recent studies that show a large percentage of the world's population—especially the poor—could soon be exposed to deadly heat and potential drought conditions more often. Africa could see deadly heat waves every year beginning as soon as 2040, according to a study published in April in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Africa "will be affected very soon and very heavily," said co-author Jana Sillmann, who specializes in studying climate extremes at CICERO, a climate research institute based in Norway. "So far, everybody is saying we can avoid dangerous climate change if we stay below 2 degrees," Sillmann said. But that doesn't hold true for Africa. It's the only continent that sits squarely in the tropics, which means there's a risk of heat waves all year round, not just in summer. From 2000-2015, Africa experienced hotter, longer and more extensive heat waves than in the last two decades of the 20th century.
Another new study—by researchers with the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute—predicted extreme and persistent heat across North Africa and parts of the Middle East by mid-century that would directly threaten human health. The average summer maximum temperatures in the region covered by the study would rise from 109 degrees Fahrenheit to about 115 degrees by 2050, and as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, the study concluded. It was published online and will appear in July in the journal Climatic Change.
Yet another recent study, also in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that the poorest 20 percent of the world's population will feel the heat extremes sooner than people in wealthier regions. Countries around the Horn of Africa and West Africa would be most affected, the researchers found.
The latest projections of increases in dangerous summer heat in developing countries are a big part of the reason that the United Nations upped its estimates of the global cost of adapting to climate change. In a report released during the international climate talks in Bonn, Germany last month, the UN said those costs could soar as high as $500 billion—four to five time higher than estimated just two years ago.
In addition to calculating how much of the Earth's surface area will be affected by extreme heat in the future, the NCAR researchers also measured the percentage of the Earth's population that will affected by those changes. They found that the greatest probability of increases in extreme summer heat overlaps with the world's most populated regions, including parts of Brazil, Central Europe and eastern China.
Cutting emissions now would benefit a disproportionately large percentage of Earth's total population, it concluded.

Links

• Antarctica's CO2 Level Tops 400 PPM for First Time in Perhaps 4 Million Years
• Iceland Experiment Successfully Turns CO2 Emissions into Rock
• Most Extreme Weather Has Climate Change Link, Study Says
• 2015: The Year the Weather Took a Particularly Wild Ride

Climate Change Poses Urgent Threat to Poor of Coastal Bangladesh

World Bank

From left to right: Susmita Dasgupta, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, Stéphane Hallegatte

Summary

• Nearly 12 million people live in poverty in the coastal region of Bangladesh.
• Poor households in coastal Bangladesh will confront increasingly severe challenges from climate change through heightened cyclonic inundation, rising river salinity, and increased soil salinity.
• The World Bank is working with the Government of Bangladesh to enable poor households to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Nearly 12 million people live in poverty in the coastal regions of Bangladesh.
The climate already poses a challenge to the lives and livelihoods of these households, seen vividly in the damage caused by Cyclone Roanu a few weeks ago.
New projections published by the World Bank suggest climate change will pose an even more severe challenge over the next three decades.
"Climate change is a major issue for all of us, but particularly the poor and vulnerable", said Research Director Asli Demirguc-Kunt, who recently hosted a Policy Research Talk on the issue.
"It's been leading to crop failures, natural disasters, and the spread of water-borne diseases, and it's an important push factor for migration."
Lead Environmental Economist Susmita Dasgupta, the main speaker at the event, presented the results of a seven-year body of research projecting the likely impact of climate change in coastal Bangladesh through 2050.
Dasgupta's projections highlight three current and growing risks with severe consequences for the poor: cyclonic inundation, river salinity, and soil salinity.
Perhaps the most visible of all threats, cyclones destroy lives and livelihoods with alarming regularity in coastal Bangladesh: severe cyclones strike every three years on average.
Rising sea levels—a direct result of climate change—will increase the land surface exposed to high levels of cyclonic inundation by more than 50 percent.
Rising river salinity presents a less visible but equally damaging threat.
River salinity increases health risks, causes a scarcity of drinking water and water for irrigation, and reduces the number of fish species—a critical source of protein for many households. Dasgupta projects a more than doubling of the number of poor exposed to saline rivers.

"Climate change is going to create severe poverty traps. Unless we address the climate change problem now, sustainable poverty reduction will remain a dream."
Susmita Dasgupta

Lead Environmental Economist Increases in soil salinity will challenge a country where 48 percent of the labor force works in the agricultural sector.
Dasgupta projects that soil salinity levels will exceed a critical threshold resulting in large yield losses in at least 24 sub-districts of Bangladesh by 2050, a pattern that is already evident in some sub-districts.        
The World Bank has been working closely with the Government of Bangladesh and other development partners on critical measures to enable poor households in coastal Bangladesh to adapt to the impacts of climate change.
These include strengthening coastal embankments, construction of multipurpose emergency shelters, and improving early warning and evacuation systems.
But based on this new body of research, Dasgupta warned that more needs to be done.
Many working-age adults have already been migrating out of threatened areas, and Dasgupta called for more efforts to provide vocational training and assistance to cope with the process of out-migration.
Another option is investment in roads outside the critical biodiverse areas of the UNESCO World Heritage Sundarbans.
Those who remain in threatened areas will be able to take advantage of better connections to market centers.
"Bangladeshi households are in the forefront of climate change. Their behavior and their path to adaptation can help us understand how millions of households around the world will behave in the future," said Dagupta.
"Climate change is going to create severe poverty traps. Unless we address the climate change problem now, sustainable poverty reduction will remain a dream."
Stéphane Hallegatte, a Senior Economist in the Climate Change Group of the World Bank, added that "if you can find a solution that works in coastal Bangladesh, it will be very useful for other coastal regions where the challenge is not as severe."

Links

• VIDEO Policy Research Talk: An Environmental Detective Story Uncovering the Visible and Not-So-Visible Threats from Climate Change
• REPORT Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty
• REPORT Decarbonizing Development: 3 Steps to a Zero-Carbon Future
• REPORT Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal

Timeline: Australia’s Climate Policy

The Conversation - Annabelle Workman | Anita Talberg

Australia’s Renewable Energy Target was reduced in 2015. Wind turbine image from www.shutterstock.com

With the Australian federal election just over a week away, it’s a good time to review the key milestones in Australian climate policy since the last federal election in September 2013.
After winning office, the Abbott government successfully repealed the “carbon tax”. However, an eclectic group of senators banded together to thwart attempts to remove other elements of Julia Gillard’s carbon price package, including several influential climate change agencies.
Heading into the July 2 election, both parties are clear on their climate policy platforms, committing to distinct approaches to meet international and domestic obligations.
Labor has pledged to establish two emissions trading schemes and achieve a goal of 50% renewables by 2030. While the Coalition, under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, is standing by its Direct Action plan and the pursuit of technological innovation.
The timeline below highlights Australian climate policy interventions from the past three years. A more comprehensive survey of the climate and clean air policy landscape since the last election is detailed in a working paper from the Australian-German Climate and Energy College.

   

Federal Election 2016: Polls Point To Rising Support For Climate Change Action

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Political parties that dither on tackling climate change do so at their own electoral peril if two polls out this week pointing to rising voter concern are any guide.
The Lowy Institute's annual poll on Australian Attitudes to The World surveyed 1202 adults earlier this year and found support for taking action to curb global warming "even if it involves significant costs" to be at its highest since 2008, up 17 percentage points to 53 per cent after hitting a nadir in 2012.  (See chart below.)
"This is a result which puts climate policy firmly on the agenda for whichever party wins government on 2 July," Michael Fullilove, Lowy's executive director, said in a statement.



A separate poll out on Wednesday from the Climate Institute found a similar rebound from 2012, with almost two-thirds wanting Australia to be "a world leader in finding solutions to climate change". (See chart of results below.) The survey was of a similar size, covering 1100 people at voting age, conducted earlier this month. Those calling for Australian leadership is also at its highest level since 2008.
Among voters, 72 per cent say they are either very or fairly concerned about climate change and only about 7 per cent say they are "not at all concerned", the Climate Institute survey found. That was up from 53 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively, in 2013.



Coalition shift
Among those disclosing party support, Coalition backers have shown the most notable shift, with 62 per cent saying they were either very or partly concerned about a warming world, up from 41 per cent in 2013 - at the height of the carbon tax debate.
For Labor supporters, concern about climate change was 79 per cent, up from 63 per cent three years ago. Some 96 per cent of Greens supporters are either very or fairly worried about climate change, up from 84 per cent in 2013.
Climate change issues have increasingly featured in the past year, including the 2015 Paris climate summit in which the Turnbull government signed up with other nations to commit to trying to stop global temperatures rising 1.5-2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Those global temperatures, though, have been breaking monthly records for the past 13 months, US agencies say, with May the latest to set new highs. Australia has also had its warmest start to any year and autumn posted the biggest departure from long-term averages for any season on record, the Bureau of Meteorology said earlier this month.
While the El Nino climate system has given global temperatures a boost in the past year, the spurt has been built on background warming as rising greenhouse gas levels trap more solar heat that would otherwise have radiated back to space. Cape Grim, the longest-running monitoring site in the southern hemisphere recorded 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide last month, up from about 280 in pre-industrial times and the highest for about four million years.
Extreme weather events are among the triggers for increased voter concern about climate change, with two-in-three polled saying they believe such events will prompt increases in the cost of living, the Climate Institute survey found. About 60 per cent of Coalition supporters were concerned.
The severe bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef this year which may have killed about a quarter of the corals, has also contributed to the climate concerns of two-thirds of those surveyed, although the share drops to 55 per cent for Coalition backers, the poll found.

Voter doubts

We've had the warmest start to any year. Photo: Leigh Henningham

According to the Climate Institute survey, only about one in three Coalition supporters think their own parties have an effective plan to combat climate change. The government says Australia will cut carbon emissions by 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.
The Coalition is yet to announce what share of renewable energy Australia should have by 2030. The current bipartisan-backed 2020 Renewable Energy Target aims to deliver 33,000 gigawatt-hours a year of solar, wind or other renewable energy by the decades end.
Labor's policy, which would aim to cut Australia's 2005-level carbon emissions by 45 per cent and derive 50 per cent of electricity by 2030, is considered effective by only 40 per cent of Labor supporters, the Climate Institute survey found.
The Greens support cutting emissions by 63-82 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero pollution by 2040.
"Our research shows that all our political parties need to do more to develop policies that not only build credibility but also build community and investor confidence," John Connor, chief executive of the institute, said.
The Lowy survey also found significant support for renewable energy, with 88 per cent of those polled saying use of fossil fuels "is in decline around the world and Australia should invest more in alternative energy sources or risk being left behind". (See chart below.)



While almost four in five Australians think we should cut reliance on fossil fuels, a slim majority - or 53 per cent - said Australia should continue to use and export them "to keep our economy strong".
"Our poll results over the last two years confirm that most Australians are looking for a future beyond fossil fuels, but there are deep divisions over how to achieve this," Alex Oliver, the poll's director, said.
While only 15 per cent of those polled by Lowy found climate change to be "not important", that ranking was enough to push it down to equal eighth of 10 "important issues facing Australia", on a par with immigration and just behind refugees and asylum seekers. Education and health topped the list.

Links

• Heatwaves in Australia
• Malcolm Turnbull risks Australia's economy with inaction on climate change
• Australia scrubbed from UN climate change report after government intervention
• Political Leaders Urged To Take Action On Climate Change And Prevent Devastation To Regional Economies
• Scientists, Business Leaders And Prominent Australians Call For Emergency Climate Action
• Climate Emergency Declaration Petition